On Wednesday August 30, 1665, the diarist Samuel Pepys ran into his parish clerk and asked how the plague was progressing within their parish. To his dismay, the clerk “told me it encreases much, and much in our parish.” Worst of all, the clerk admitted that the plague was so bad that he had falsified his weekly reports of parish plague deaths: “for, says he, there died nine this week, though I have returned but six.” Whether or not Pepys castigated the parish clerk in person, he recorded his condemnation of such “a very ill practice” in his diary. The numbers within the bills of mortality were a vital public health guide during plague outbreaks and it was imperative for them to be as accurate as possible.

God’s Terrible Voice in the City by Thomas Vincent describes the disastrous judgments of plague and fire that devastated London in 1665-1666. Today, two different editions of this work appear in the collections of Early English Books Online and Evans Early American Imprint Collection, the former published in London in 1667 and the latter published in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1668. The American publication of a book on a London disaster shows how a religious culture of providentialism- the belief that God cast down supernatural favor and punishment on the world- stretched across the Atlantic in the early modern English world (See Kierner, Inventing Disaster for more).  Disaster in Europe mattered in North America.   The Bills of Mortality offered a way to calculate the scale of disaster, and this distinction is clear in Cambridge printer Marmaduke Johnson’s title page.  The American version of the text also advertised the addition of a General Bill to the printing, noting under the author’s credit: “To which is added, The Generall Bill of Mortality, Shewing the Number of Persons which died in every Parish of all Diseases, and of the Plague, in the Year abovesaid.”  Although neither the Evans nor EEBO transcriptions (or the America’s Historical Imprints scans of either version) show a copy, table, or even a list of Parishes like the title page touted, the 1665 General Bill clearly accompanied the printing in some form.  The Bills took on significance far beyond London.